Temporary urbanism: a situated approach

Over the past decade, temporary urbanism has emerged as an imaginary and a practice. This chapter introduces the importance of a critical and grounded approach to the phenomenon and outlines the key themes discussed in the monograph. It argues that the roots of temporary urbanism lie in established Western cultural tropes depicting vacancy and temporariness as urban social and spatial alterity. Linking its establishment to dynamics of austerity policymaking and urban restructuring, it contends that temporary urbanism has become a key imaginary in a recurrent urban crisis landscape geared towards greater life and place insecurity. The need for a situated and longitudinal approach undergirds the rationale behind a semi-ethnographic focus on the glamorisation of austerity culture in post-2008 London.